Site Mobile Navigation

Whom Does Philosophy Speak For?

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the latest in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Seyla Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of many books, including “Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: How do you see the importance of the public sphere as a site for critically discussing issues regarding the persistence and reality of race in America?

Seyla Benhabib: We are conducting this conversation in the aftermath of the church shootings in South Carolina; the moving and inspiring memorial services to the victims, and the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State capitol. These are events that have raised some of the most significant debates about racial symbolism in the North American public sphere. We have all been reminded of the presence of the past, and to paraphrase William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Photo

Seyla BenhabibCredit Bettina Strauss

I did not know, for example, that the Confederate flag was revived in Southern states during and after the civil rights movement in clear defiance of racial equality and integration. This was not just a flag that Confederate soldiers fought and died under. It became, as some South Carolinian representatives told us, a symbol of defiance and hatred, and a reminder that the Civil War may have been won but that the battle for overcoming racial prejudice has not ended.

G.Y.: Yes. Within our world, though not restricted to signs and symbols of hatred, we are bombarded by racist signs and symbols.

S.B.: We live in televisual societies that are drowning in messages, images and symbols which circulate at the click of a mouse. The Internet creates iconic images immediately and these can have a galvanizing force — for good and for bad. Think of the image of Neda, the young Iranian girl shot in 2009 during anti-regime demonstrations in Tehran, or Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vegetable vendor who in 2011 set himself on fire and whose death prompted the so-called Arab Spring. Images such as these indicate the power of electronic and televisual communication in public culture at large.

These new technologies of the public sphere also challenge democratic societies in that the speed of the circulation of images often overwhelms the communicative and deliberative processes that need to take place among all those affected to unpack and understand what is being implied by these images; whether they mean the same to all involved; and if not, how or why not? In societies that are still strongly divided — even if not legally and constitutionally — along racial and ethnic lines, this public conversation becomes all the more significant for learning to live together. As we saw in the case of the South Carolina massacre, sometimes sorrow and grief, which tear apart the fabric of everydayness, are powerful teachers. They can bring forth unexpected empathy and solidarity.

G.Y.: We far too often fail to understand each other across racial divides. A “post-racial” discourse might even occlude the effort to do so. How do we create spaces for understanding the conditions of others, especially within the context of racial boundaries that divide us?

One of the worst offenses of racism is that it blinds us to who the individual person is — the color of your skin becomes the mask which I see and often, behind which I do not want to see the real person.

S.B.: Let me begin with a personal memory: I first came to this country from Istanbul, Turkey, as a foreign scholarship student in 1970 to Brandeis University. The program that sponsored me, the Larry Wien International Program, had great outreach success in African countries and there were many African Wien students. Yet, when we sat in the student cafeteria, the African students would sit in the company of African-American students, and effectively we self-segregated in one of the most progressive institutions of its time in the country.

G.Y.: What was your response to this?

S.B.: I was almost offended by this. I came from a country that was divided along all sorts of ethnic and religious lines, but not the color line. Having been active in the student movement of ’68 and beyond, to me it was incomprehensible that at least those of us who shared similar political views could not be friends and colleagues. Brandeis, like much of North America at the time, was in the grips of forms of black separatism. Angela Davis had been a student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis, and I had come to study with Marcuse, not realizing that he had already left for University of California at San Diego! It was not until I attended Yale Graduate School and formed friendships with Lorenzo Simpson and Robert Gooding-Williams that I began to fathom something about depth and hurt of the color line in this country.

I share this anecdote with you because, as Iris Marion Young reminded us, to understand one another across racial and many other divides we have to begin by “greeting” and “storytelling.” One of the worst offenses of racism is that it blinds us to who the individual person is — the color of your skin becomes the mask which I see and often, behind which I do not want to see the real person. And as Du Bois, a student of Hegel’s, reminds us, the one who is in the dominated position is aware of the perspective of the master: She is conscious of herself as being seen by the other. It is this double-consciousness that we must learn to understand. We must learn to see each other — to use terms which I introduced in “Situating the Self” both as “the generalized” and “the concrete other.”

Related

As humans, we are like one another, equally entitled to respect and dignity; but we are also different from one another because of our concrete psychological histories, abilities, racial and gender characteristics, etc. Ethics and politics are about negotiating this identity-in-difference across all divides. We live in a “post-racial” society only in the sense that we are all generalized others in the eyes of the law; but as we learn painfully, not in the eyes of those who administer the law; the bank clerk who decides upon a mortgage loan or even — to use Cornel West’s famous example — the New York taxi cab driver who refuses to pick up the black man. The history of discrimination, domination and power struggles among the concrete others trump the standpoint of the generalized other.

G.Y.: In “Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange,” you observe, “But in its deepest categories Western philosophy obliterates differences of gender as these shape and structure the experiences and subjectivity of the self.” Is it also true that Western philosophy obliterates differences of race and how this social category shapes the experiences of nonwhites?

S.B.: Western philosophy, as distinguished from myth, literature, drama and many other forms of human expression, speaks in the name of the universal. Philosophy emerges when Socrates and Plato show how we have to free ourselves from the “idols of the city,” and when the pre-Socratics ask about what constitutes matter and the universe, rejecting the answers provided by the Greek polytheistic myths. There is something subversive in this philosophical impulse and even when Plato reinscribes differences of natural talent and ability into the order of the city, he does so by subverting the established order of the Greek polis, in which only the free male heads of households, who were also slave-owners, were free citizens. According to “The Republic,” differences in the city will not be based on social and economic status but on talents and capabilities shown by children differentially at birth: Some are bronze, some are silver and only the very few are gold!

G.Y.: Yes, this is Plato’s Noble Lie.

S.B.: Yes. It is important to hold on to these moments in the birth of our discipline because rather than denouncing the Western philosophical tradition as the canon produced by “dead, white men,” we need to remember that moment of opening and closure, subversion and restoration, freedom and domination that are present in these texts that we love: from “The Republic” to Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” From Aristotle’s “Politics” to Locke’s “Second Treatise of Civil Government” and Rousseau’s “Social Contract” and the “Emile,” this dynamic of opening and closure holds. And it is in the context of this dynamic of freedom for some and domination for others that we need to understand both gender and racialized difference.

G.Y.: Perhaps we can think here of Hegel’s claim that black people have no geist, (roughly, spirit or awareness), and Locke’s investment in the slave trade.

S.B.: John Locke was also tutor and secretary to the earl of Shaftesbury, and he wrote the Constitution of the Carolinas for him. Locke is a colonizer, who believes that the white man’s labor in appropriating and working the land will create a condition that will be beneficial to all. But who exactly is working the land? Not the master but the servant, and we know historically that there not only were indentured white servants during Locke’s time in the British colonies, but also enslaved black people. In view of the presence of these “others,” who haunt the text, what do we make of Locke’s theory of consent, equality and rationality? How much of these ideals are “polluted” by the presence of the other whose equal rationality is never presumed? This is the kind of question that the critical investigation of race in these texts leads us to ask.

Unlike Locke, who is a natural rights theorist, Hegel has a deep sense of history and is a great social realist. I never know quite what to make of the “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” where he discusses Africa and claims that black people have no geist. Clearly, he was ignorant. These were popular and popularizing lectures, simplistic in the extreme. Unlike Locke, who was familiar with the realities of colonialism and the slave trade, Hegel does discuss “Lordship and Bondage” in a most sublimated and abstract way in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” without much reference to the colonization of the New World. Yet, he has a great deal to say about the fact that persons cannot be property and that slavery is against human freedom and reason in “The Philosophy of Right.”

Democracy can only survive as social democracy, and that is what we are lacking in the United States.

All this complicates the question of how to read Hegel, and even more important, how to appropriate him for critical philosophy and race theory. Obviously, Du Bois did so brilliantly by separating the power of Hegelian categories from the Hegel’s own limited historical knowledge and personal prejudice. Du Bois, in “The Souls of Black Folk,” even deployed the concept of “Volksgeist” for black people, to investigate their own achievements and collective spirit.

G.Y.: I think that it is important to mention that within the Western philosophical tradition, the mind, coded as white and male, is privileged over the body, coded as female or a signification of blackness, creating a false, disembodied practice.

S.B.: Of course, I agree with you. The master also shows “mastery” over his own feelings and emotions, where domination over the other means domination over the otherness within. As Adorno and Horkheimer argued brilliantly in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Western philosophy reason is understood as “ratio,” as instrumental reason, which in Descartes’ famous words intends to render us “masters and possessors of Nature.” Such ratio is an instrument for the social domination of others. And the slave, whether black or not, is always represented as part of the order of nature that needs to be mastered and subjugated. Such an understanding of rationality brings with it the dualism of mind/body.

Yet we also have to remember that there is a different view of the relation of reason to the emotions, and of body to soul which is more one of education and formation and shaping – not domination. I would argue that from Aristotle to Hume to Smith and even the early Hegel, we find another model of rationality as “embodied intelligence,” as the shaping of emotion by reason rather than its domination. John Dewey is the most articulate philosopher of this alternative understanding of rationality.

Related

G.Y.: As a political theorist, do you think democracy is really able to deliver equality to black people, to fully translate universalistic human rights into real change for them, especially as they have, for hundreds of years, been deemed sub-persons?

S.B.: I don’t think that it is democracy that is failing black people in the United States, but the assault on democracy itself through the forces of a global corporate capitalism run amok and the rise of a vindictive and racist conservative movement that is unraveling the civic compact. Democracy is impossible without some form of socio-economic equality among citizens. Instead, in the United States in the last two decades, the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has increased, voting rights and union rights have been embattled. There is rampant criminal neglect of public goods such as highways, railroads and bridges – not to mention the brazen onslaught of big money to buy off elections since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision. We have become a mass democracy that is producing gridlock in representative institutions precisely because it is in the interest of global corporate capitalism to render representative institutions ineffective.

I fear for the future of democracy in the United States, and am grateful that, unlike in other countries, we have a military that believes in democracy and is not inclined to carry out a coup. But there are other forces which are undermining democratic institutions. Democracy can only survive as social democracy, and that is what we are lacking in the United States. Under conditions of growing inequality and plutocratic attacks on democracy, it is the most vulnerable populations such as urban or rural black communities that are most affected.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Charles Mills, Peter Singer, Cornel West and others) can be found here.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.

What's Next

The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.